I didn’t get a grant because I took a stance against censoring young artists. But we’re gonna say what we have to say regardless. This is why I’m an entrepreneur. This is why I’m making for-profit moves. I could give a fuck about making buckets of money. This is about being LOUD.

Literary Review

In The Affordances of Social Media Platforms The authors go through the history of the concept of affordance. They start from its roots in the field of ecological psychology with Gibson who first coined the term to describe how natural features of an environment afford different things to different species. For one species a tree branch affords climbing, to another it affords material for building a dam, while for humans it affords fuel for fire. Then they go on to Norman who appropriated the term to describe how objects are designed. Norman used affordance to describe how designers use formal properties of an object to communicate how it should be used. From their they investigate a variety of different affordances to show the wide range of ways affordance is conceptualized. This gives the reader a firm understanding of affordances which allows the authors to then expand the concept for use in specifically describing socio-technological environments. The context they provide earlier allows the reader to become familiar with the concept of affordance, then they draw on that familiarity to argue that using affordances effectively in the socio-technological context requires a platform-sensitive framework, where platform-sensitivity acknowledges that the unique ways a platform connects its various stakeholders further complicates how it can be described with affordances.

Response and Impact on My Thesis

I found language, terminologies, and concepts that make it easier for me to talk about the area I am studying and using them will make it easier for me to locate more material in this area. From this reading I discovered social media studies, imagined and vernacular affordances, low level affordances, and a methodology for analyzing websites called discursive interface analysis. A concept which I found useful was understanding a social media’s features as communicative actors, which rely on mutual understanding of the symbols and metaphor being used.

I am considering employing the discursive interface analysis methodology “which takes a site’s affordances as a starting point in order to analyse how they produce and make visible particular norms of use,” (Bucher, Taina, and Anne Helmond 18). I am interested in using the methodology to analyze websites that have features I want to incorporate into my concepts.

I was excited to discover imagined and vernacular affordances as I have been trying to describe such a concept but lacked the language. Imagined affordances describes how users may not be constrained to a particular way of using a platform but conform their behaviour to fit the culture that has already been established on it. So although Linkedin and Facebook have very similar affordances users imagine that Facebook affords connecting with friends and that Linkedin affords connecting with colleagues.

There were also arguments in the reading that I disagree with or felt were not fully defined. The authors proposed that algorithms are non-human agents which I disagree with. I believe algorithms are human agents in that they are designed by humans with a specific purpose. There was an area of the paper which flip things around to argue that platforms rely on their users as an affordance, not just affording actions to its users. While I understood the idea I felt it was poorly defined and left a lot of room for misinterpretation.

Aside

They do not give a definition of socio-technological environments, however in their paper they use the term to refer to websites, and social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin.

Works Cited

Bucher, Taina, and Anne Helmond. 2017. “The Affordances of Social Media Platforms.” In The SAGE Handbook of Social Media, edited by Jean Burgess, Thomas Poell, and Alice Marwick. London and New York: SAGE Publications Ltd

If they’re disturbed by XXX’s that means they have been taking the genre literally this whole time. Are they thrilled by imagery of violence being inflicted on black people. Are white men living vicarious through rappers whose lyrics involve violence on black people, black women?

Disclaimer: This is post is not about chastising the art form of hip hop/rap. It’s a questions about the listeners and what they get from the art. For me I gravitate toward hip hop/rap music because it was cathartic in how it spoke about an experience that I was having with being low income, feeling geographically trapped, experiencing racism, and violence. I’m disturbed by what pulls listeners who did not have that experience to hip hop, and what that says about them.

This is the first of many LOUD mixes that will come out every couple of months. The mixes will be curated by various LOUD affiliated DJ’s.

The mixes are open to all music. LOUD has a preference toward music from (in order of priority) Black, Women-identifying, POC, Queer artists but ultimately the songs featured are up to the DJ.

Think of @ONYXisLOUD as a radio station #ONYXLOUDRadio, where you discover dope emerging artists in LOUD Mixes. Eventually we’ll also be featuring content from LOUD artist picked from LOUD’s Artist Suite (coming in 2018).

I'm so thankful to my family and friends. Thanks for coming to celebrate with me. Thanks for putting your good energies into my life. Thanks for blessing me as I turn 25 and charging me up with more than enough positivity for the journeys ahead.

I can remember my first day of Kindergarten. I’m seeing the walk over in my head right now. I had no idea what was going on or where we were going but eventually we arrived at a building. I remember two giants at the opening of the door, welcoming me in with a warm embrace that made me feel safe but a little confused.

I was used to giant people interacting mostly with each other, only acknowledging me briefly. Being the centre of attention wasn’t something that happened on these trips out into the world, so this felt off. But the shower of protection I felt from my own giant, the tall powerful guardian always watching over me, made me brave and eager to explore.

The first hurdle I had to overcome was the colossal front step. I shot my foot up as high as possible to clear it but my efforts were unnecessary as I began to levitate: my mom was pulling me up by my arm.

When I got in I was in awe. I felt like I was inside an indoor playground. I was overwhelmed by the amount of things to play with. Eventually the indoor sand box consumed me, So much so that it was difficult for my mom to get my attention when she was ready to leave. When she finally did she gave me a hug, said bye, and began to move to the door. I went over to leave with her, and then she explained to me that I was staying here, which terrified me so much I began to cry. My mom and one of the ladies tried to calm me down. I worked myself up so much that I fell asleep shortly after. When I woke up my mom had left and I imagined that she was somewhere far away beyond the giant step.

Years later, in my late teens, I went back to that building, St Gerard Majella Catholic School. I wanted to see the colossal step another time. When I got there I was surprised beyond belief. The colossal step I had remember so vividly was actually tiny, even shorter than the steps of regular stairs.

School assignment for time based media course. "Select an artwork presented in class, or approved by the teacher, or select your own artwork. Referencing our foundational readings (Benjamin and McLuhan), discuss how that artwork's medium or mode of production affects our experience of the piece." I had fun with it decided to look at Kendrick's newly released music video for ELEMENT. This paper made me uncover some interesting themes in the song, I think I'm on to something 🤔

Was meeting with someone today to introduce them to LOUD! They were super excited with it and in talking asked me send him some music that I was into. So I made this list of songs. These are songs that over the past couple years have gotten me excited. The artists, the culture, and the music keep me motivated, keep working on making LOUD a reality 😁.

Good news is on the way 🙏🏿🤞🏿😝 in the meantime check out these songs, aka the life blood of LOUD.

BUILD is an ONYX project that is about supporting black entrepreneurship, but most importantly facilitating the growth of businesses that I want to one day be apart of ONYX. In full maturity ONYX will be a conglomerate of business that are guided by it's framework of being social equitable, environmental sustainable, and unapologetically BLACK. I'm looking back on where I started with BUILD and where it is now and where its heading.

This is my introduction for myself for a talk I'm facilitating today called BLANK Table Talk which is apart of the BLACK Entrepreneurship Initiative I co-founded at OCADu, the school I'm currently attending. The talk is intended to introduce the initiative to the students and the black/creatives/business/professional community to get their feedback on what they want to see from it. Check out the event at https://www.facebook.com/events/251868861923713/

I was looking up the history of the internet and got taken to a page where a person is explain the history of the web to their grand parent.

I thought that reversal of history telling is so indicative of the time we live in. Information used to be passed down but now it's passed up. It's because of how connected we are and how that connectivity accelerates the development of knowledge. New information is being generated so rapidly that the new paradigm has become who can learn the fastest as opposed to who has more information from accumulating it slowly over time. When it comes to learning younger brains have the upper hand in. So today knowledge is passed up.

I wonder what that means for the future because that changes everything. Knowledge and information are touchy topics where a lot of ego is involved, and arrogants can be developed. And experience is still the best teacher, so there has to be room for negotiation when it comes to deciding who we deem as being the most knowledgeable in a situation where that matters.

Also thought it was interesting when I searched up some of the pioneers of the internet that a lot of them are relatively young like mid 40’s. It shows how recent this is and how much has happened in such a short period of time.

Captureland was an experience for me that resonated so deep within my being it engaged every strand of the entity that gives me energy. It told me to recollect every lesson I've ever learnt past, present, and future; in this life and in others. Because actualizing something requires patience but patience isn't necessarily a product of time. I was a Tookie. I saw him chart a plan to return home after centuries of being stolen. And to some that's crazy. But where they see crazy, we see reason.

I’m proud to say I have 26+ artist in LOUD’s Music Group. I’ve secured $1720 in funding; LOUD has been viewed 1207 times online; has 103 followers despite not officially launching any social media; has 100% positive responses and every day I meet people that love the idea and want to be apart of building it.

Going deeper into my World Building Assignment for school. We were split into groups of two, each choose a neighbourhood and had to reconstruct how it would look in our alternate reality where cities are built underground. I focused on Jane and Finch and further fleshed out my earlier plot by analyzing how it has suffered marginalization and what that would look like in the underground scenario.

Apple music, Spotify, etc make this assumption that paying for a service is related to someone's willingness to have the service. Its something they've learned from the flawed but prevailing economic theories in North America that are used in our brand of capitalism. The truth is how much money someone exchanges to another person for a good or service has nothing to do with their willingness to pay, and more to do with their ability to.

I notice that people have been treating me like I'm fragile and I think it has something to do with the fact that I'm very forth coming about being sensitive 🙄 but that doesn't mean I want people to censor themselves around me or that I'm gonna bite your head of for saying something I dont agree with 😑 I've never been that person.. The reason why I'm very loud about being senstive is because I want people to know that its not something I'm ashamed and that its complelely valid to be black and male and sensitive.